Beowulf's Children

"Justin's half-brother," Cadma

"Yes. If there had been any danger of Aaron relating to one of his sisters, I would have said something. I keep track of such things... but it never came up. Jessica isn't his biological sister any more than Justin is."

Sylvia was very quiet, still, her mind off in some unreachable place.

"Aaron and Justin."

"What do we do now?" Rachael asked.

"I think we go to the mainland. On the next dirigible."

Sylvia curled onto her side, still floating an inch or so off the chair. "I never held him," she said quietly. "I never told him that he was mine, that I would watch him and care for him. That he was the most beautiful thing in the world. The most precious child in existence."

"Probably no one did," Rachael said. "We should have done that. Aaron, and thirty others. Belonging to no one but each other. No wonder they started their cult. They had to belong somewhere."

"Who is living in there?" Cadma

"I think that we need to find out," Carlos said. "I think that we need to find out now."

Chapter 28

TITHE

An honest God is the noblest work of man.

ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL, Gods, Part I

"Home tomorrow," Justin said. Aaron nodded, and accepted a cup of coffee from him. The valley was swollen with mist, and it rolled across them almost sleepily.

Justin had taken the early-morning shift.

Aaron sipped at the coffee. "We're going through the main valley. We have a couple of choices there, you know."

Justin nodded. "Here be grendels. They're too far from the main camp to do us any great harm."

"But the herd will come close enough for trouble."

"I say we take the long way around." Justin scratched in the dust with his toe. Trees, hills, a stream. "If we take the southern route, we can avoid the problem."

"We do, on the other hand, have to ford the stream. No choice about that."

Grendels were death in the water. The smartest thing to do was to kill everything grendel-sized before the eventuality even arose.

"So," said Aaron. "What do you think?"

"This planet was here before we came, and it will be here after we're gone. I don't think we can kill everything we don't like. There has to be another way, and I want to find it."

"I agree." Aaron marked a position upstream from the fording spot. "What say we seed the water with a freshly slaughtered steer? Draw the grendels up. We won't get them from further down—that's another grendel's territory, and there is plenty of food. Grendels don't fight unless they have to... especially the mainland varieties."

"What do you mean?"

Aaron was thoughtful. "We never really studied grendel interactions, grendel behavior, beyond basic hunt and attack patterns. But doesn't it seem that these grendels can actually think? Plan? Observe? They're intelligent—much more than the First told us. They were here long before we were. I think that one day we may be able to communicate with them...." He stopped, and laughed. "Just dreaming, I guess. Let's get on with the day, huh?"

What was it with Aaron and grendels? It gave Justin goose bumps. Aaron was sheer death in the grendel-shooting games, as if the cartoon grendels saw Aaron and just fell over.

Old Grendel slept.

The prey that lived in the lake would feed her until the end of things. She had eaten well the previous day, and in these times of long sleeps and quiet days, a single major feeding could last her ten to fifteen days before hunger grew unendurable.

She occasionally roused from dream, disturbed by the daughters of God flying overhead. Their hum was the sound of the Death Wind. It frightened her down to her core, made her hunker down into the water and watch, just watch.

Change was in the air. The light was hallucinatory; everything felt evanescent, transitory, tissue-thin. She sniffed the thousand scents of lesser life forms preparing themselves for the end of everything. Some began a madness of breeding; some avoided breeding entirely; some changed color or shape, or migrated, or entered a sleep from which even a grendel could not rouse them.

You couldn't think, couldn't plan for the end of everything. But, drowsily, Old Grendel was trying... when the smell of blood snapped her fully awake.

Three times within the past several days, she had followed such a scent. Each time she'd found a dead puzzle beast floating, in still water. After she had allowed it to ripen for a day or two, it tasted just fine. Last time, when she returned to her favorite resting spot, she noticed that large numbers of animals had passed her way: many puzzle beasts, a few of the two-legged weirds.

The weirds flew through the air in humming flyers, the daughters of God. They walked; or they ran almost as fast as a sister on speed, riding strange shells that smelled of tar and lightning. They combined too many different smells in one. They didn't eat their own young. She knew this because she had come close enough to their nests to watch them.

She had tested their defenses. They knew where she was before she could smell them. If she came close enough to make out distinct aspects of their behavior, they became alarmed. Twice they sent flying things in pursuit. But when she retreated, they did not attempt to engage.

She found their roles of combat not entirely dissimilar to her own.

They could move fast. They were hunters. They hoarded their young.

Could they be a kind of grendel? There were builder grendels, and the great flat unmoving grendels of the north, and the snow grendels she'd had to fight twice in her life, and the kind that laid her swimmers in a stranger's pond...

In her youth, Old Grendel had wandered far during the rainy seasons. Wanderlust and curiosity were somehow linked to the days when her head had nearly burst. When the pain faded it left behind a new clarity. She began to see ways that the world fit together. She developed a hunger of a different kind, that pulled her toward the blurry edges of the pattern that was the world.

She followed the water.

When she found water already stocked with one of her own kind, she fought. But if the taste in the water was alien... Two dissimilar grendels could share the same water. They snarled and snapped at each other, but managed somehow to keep the terrible speed under control. They could tolerate each other's presence, if each knew that to begin was to end.

The weirds, now. Were they some new kind of grendel?

The smell of blood from upstream was strong; but Old Grendel moved downstream by a little, away from the blood. She coated herself with mud, and burrowed deep. She extended her snorkel to breathe. And she waited, and watched.

Chaka brought Skeeter II low in over the river thirty clicks south of Shangri-La. There was a grendel there, but no point in killing it. An empty ecological niche would merely attract a younger, faster monster. So he let sleeping grendels lie, and so far the arrangement had been a good one.

Three times before, they had lured the grendel upstream with a slaughtered carcass. They had watched via camera. The first time she had dragged the meat back to her lair. Unsatisfactory. So they'd chained the meat to the ground. The grendel had to devour it there, and she did, after examining the area.

And the third time they had taken their herd across in safety, because the grendel was busy eating. They had, in a matter of speaking, tithed to the grendel god. Aaron had insisted on it, and Chaka liked it as well.

Today Chaka swept the river with his glasses, and saw nothing.